The ten most recent comments across all entries are now available in an Atom feed. This is primarily for me, so that I can avoid logging into my CMS a bajillion times each day.
Some notes:
I'm sort of lying about feed/link. Atom requires a feed-level link with
rel="alternate", which the spec says should point to an alternate
version of the contents of the feed. The thing is, I don't publish a
list of recent comments in any other format, so I'm forced to fib and
point to something largely
unrelated to the feed's contents. I chose this site's front page.
Why does Atom keep forcing me to lie?
Commentors' URLs are not included in the feed. Atom URLs have to actually be URIs -- no lying here -- and, while my system rejects malicious code, it makes no effort to ensure that what you've supplied in the URL field is really an URL. You could make, "Screw you, I'm not including an URL" your URL, and I wouldn't mind; but the Feed Validator would. (It wouldn't be very funny, anyway.) So, no URLs for now.
I didn't get as much done in this space in 2004 as I'd like, but there might be a few things a select few of you will find interesting. Continuing my love affair with HTML lists, here are a few things you might have missed, in the order they first appeared.
February 22: Displaying del.icio.us Links on Your Site with del.icio.us.pl 0.2. del.icio.us has changed the way I share links with friends, the way I blog [1], and, more generally, the way I view the web. Get an account if you haven't already.
[1] I've yet to integrate the links into this new design, but I'm still generating an Atom version.
May 25: Upgrading Creative Commons Licenses. The original Creative Commons licenses required that the licensor guarantee to the licensee that the he/she had secured the right to enter into an agreement concerning the work in question. The new licenses dropped this provision. What's the point of guaranteeing that you've secured the rights to a work if you're allowed to later retract that guarantee (by "upgrading" the license)? Doesn't the original guarantee have to apply no matter how bad you want to upgrade to the latest, hippest license?
May 7: Extending XHTML: Target and Strict. Some folks were worried that extending XHTML might throw browsers into Quirks Mode; I tried to show that it's probably not a problem.
June 18: Gmail Invites. I offered some Gmail invitations to you kind readers and got more than 250 comments before I turned them off. A few of you were kind enough to complete an offer at freeipods.com in return for an invitation, but -- hint, hint -- I still need two more to get that damn iPod. I certainly wouldn't complain if you signed-up and completed an offer using my referral link. And, yes, I still have a few invitations left.
June 11: Validation Matters. A few notable web designers complained that they were tired of hearing about their HTML/CSS validation errors. I'm not notable (or even a professional web designer), but I do value your feedback, for whatever that's worth.
September 03: Extending Columns. It's possible to create the effect of a menu column that extends the length of a longer, primary column using CSS and without the use of images. Give it a try.
I wish there were more, but thanks for reading, anyway.